A friend of mine was killed in Aug 2006 by an animal on the road.
She was driving along the highway and an elk jumped out in front of the vehicle ahead, bounced up over it, and into her windshield. Everyone who saw the accident said there was nothing she could have done, as she couldn't have even seen the elk until it was coming over the vehicle in the front. Her passenger, and the people in the car ahead, were all fine.
But, of course, what she could have done was not follow the vehicle ahead so closely.
You obviously haven't got the barest grasp on the term, you're simply too stupid to prove shit.
You haven't even shown that 'the military shoots deserters' is inaccurate, let alone that it is a deliberate misrepresentation.
Besides, my point is that you forfeit your rights. That the military can shoot you is enough. When you join the army your rights go away. You don't relinquish them, they are taken. If they were relinquished, you would take them back when lied to or treated unfairly. As this is clearly not an option, you clearly no longer have those rights.
You don't even understand the issue, it's no wonder you don't understand the ramifications.
As for what you predict, yes numbnuts, it's usual for people to reply to messages. You may also wish to predict my future typing, eating, walking, and of course, putting you in your ignorant place.
But who says you're abusing it? If the server is configured to give you a response, why should you think that it's not intended?
They obviously had to intend to install the servers, and encode the shows, configure the webserver, etc.
There's no reason for anyone who views this to assume that it isn't intentional. Many sites let you view their content without ads (printable pages, etc) because at least you're not with a competitor. And even if it didn't make business sense, why is that the customer's responsibility to assess?
All they had to do was call the system administrators and tell them to lock down that URL to anyone with an "I've viewed ads cookie", or whatever else they want.
Why aren't they expected to do this? Why is this the viewer's problem when they should just stop providing what they don't want to provide?
Imagine a company with separate a storefront. Management runs a free widget day every now and then when a supplier has overstock or wants publicity. Salespeople happily distribute these free products to drive sales of related products.
Now imagine that the managers mistype a stock number and instead of giving away mice, the store is giving away laptops. Anyone who got a free laptop (and thinks it's just an insane giveaway day) rightly calls their friends to let them know, etc.
What should the hypothetical managers do when they realize this? Send police to the store to arrest anyone attempting to receive a free laptop? Try to censor message boards about the supposed free laptop day? Or maybe call the store and tell them not to distribute free laptops?
If you grade people on homework then you lack some understanding. You may be great at other parts of teaching, but you're just encouraging cheating and punishing those who don't by lessening the apparent (grades) distance between the actually good and the successful cheats.
People take courses with graded homework because by cheating on it they can get a high enough grade on the homework to pass despite their low exam performance.
Tests are *the* time to separate those who know from those who cheat.
Just provide the homework as a self-graded exercise. Explain what the test will cover and let people make their own decisions.
Sure. And the webserver is your property. And your property sent me a copy of your webpage.
You really don't get the point of a public URL. It's like a phone number. There's no law against calling a phone number, even if the answering machine is playing copyright songs.
I think you're confused. DRM is what companies do to things they sell you. They're like a lock on part of the product that they don't even unlock when you buy it.
If they used DRM everyone could still view it, but wouldn't be able (theoretically) to make excerpts for quoting, etc.
Here nobody (of the viewers) owns the product so it would be reasonable for them to password it. But that's a lot different than DRM.
DRM is about restricting your rights and ability to use something you own. Had they 'protected' this it would just be passwording a URL because nobody has an inherent right to watch the show. (Merely a right to go to any URL and view anything it displays, which may be a show, or may be a 'click here to buy access' notice.
If you try to leave, they will shoot you if they can't apprehend you by other means, and will use lethal force to keep you in jail *if* they don't execute you. (Unlikely except during war, yes, but still a very real possibility - especially if you're unrepentant.) They *may* choose not to kill you, but it's their decision. They have exercised it a number of times.
"You evidently have no concept of the time it takes to write a Slashdot post" ANd you evidently are still having trouble with reading comprehension No moron, I haven't been "trolling" you, if that's what you call being right, for a week. It's only taken about fifteen minutes. If you can't see that meaning in 'the time it takes to write' you may be... special.
Why does the fact that I'm an asshole make you being a proven liar funny? Well, if you had even the slightest clue what 'proven' meant you wouldn't be half as funny.
Of course, now is when you reply with your pathetic attempt to not look wrong and stupid. You've failed every time so far, but I'll give you permission to try again. In fact, I'm telling you to reply and try again. Yes massa, right away massa.
Remember when you were saying that the military doesn't take your rights away?
You said that they don't and had a asinine justification about people relinquishing their rights. If you want to see a filthy fucking liar, get a mirror. It's assholes like you who spread the deepest shit. It's far more correct to say the military shoots deserters than to say that the joining the military doesn't remove your rights. They have the legal right to shoot you, you don't have a legal right to leave.
UCMJ 85 (c) Any person found guilty of desertion or attempt to desert shall be punished, if the offense is committed in time of war, by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct...
In the face of the enemy, yes. Desertion can lead to you getting shot. Perhaps on the battlefield as you flee, or by a firing squad.
The government doesn't shoot many deserters now, but then they aren't drafting now and the two tend to go together. That doesn't change that they have the authority to.
If you try to desert and they toss you in jail, you still haven't left the armed forces but they will certainly shoot at you if you try to escape prison.
Death, or military prison. Great choices.
Trolling you? For days? You evidently have no concept of the time it takes to write a Slashdot post. Nor for what trolling is, but that's hardly the first comprehension problem you're having.
Just burning you up... But no, you don't care. Not at all. You posted to tell me so.
If you weren't such an abominable asshole this wouldn't be so funny.
You have no idea what a lie is. You evidently think it means a statement you can't refute.
However you want to phrase it, you lose the ability to manage your own life when you join the armed forces. Even if you agreed with what they told you at recruitment they wouldn't honor it.
If that's demonstrably a lie, why don't you do so? Perhaps because you couldn't? Hmmmm?
You care Sparky. A lot. It must burn you up inside to be so incapable of even simple arguments. You won't reply to this, because I'm saying this, but you'll go kick something.
I have seen the behavior you describe, but it's far from universal.
What happens when a clerk is called to another part of the store? They try to cover, but sometimes need to close a line immediately.
When they open a nearby register people in the front of the one line seem to have a general societal right-of-way as the woman expected, but only when they aren't sleeping as you describe.
You could try to prove me wrong, but that would only further demonstrate your complete lack of understanding.
You obviously don't understand half of the words you use, so it's unlikely you understand all of the ones I use. You may ask about the big ones. If you stop being a total fucktard I might even help without condescension.
Are you saying that recruiters always tell the truth?
Or that leaving the army is voluntary?
Or that you can't be killed/jailed for life for desertion?
Or that there is no provision for starting the draft even if it's inactive now?
And that this is because your parents didn't want to cut over so quickly as to not give the truck proper stopping distance?
If so, they were in the right. Doing so wouldn't be safe. Anyone who says otherwise is a tailgater.
Try moving over just a bit to take up both lanes, not enough to be in the truck's way, but to make it obvious that you'll cut off anyone who tries to pass before they manage it. It'll also make your intent to get out of the way more obvious to the other drivers, hopefully giving them a reason to wait.
Did you do what I'm describing, as one of the following cars, to give them time? If so I think that was good too. If more people would do that (go out of their way to give them extra space) whenever anyone's having a problem we'd all be a lot happier.
Would you rather a lunatic who'd merge into a 2-car space at highway speeds be in front of you where you can see him and he'll quickly vanish into the distance, or stuck impatiently behind you looking for any opening? If you give him a safe place to merge into he'll rocket off safely (to you) and endanger other people.
If you maintain a slower speed he'll hit the traffic jams (and fume) only to have you pull up behind him just as traffic starts to move. It's so funny when people get apoplectic about traffic as you serenely cruise along.
But if the coed chokes for ten seconds before drinking the remainder of the beer she's getting less alcohol per hour than with a slower feed.
Traffic jams leave ~1m between cars, almost at a standstill. That's a rate of one car per 5-10 seconds, at best. If they left 40m between cars and cruised at 100kph you'd get roughly three cars in the same time.
The faster and smoother emptying rate of the highway should actually empty the feeder roads faster than it would if everyone crammed on at once.
You have extreme comprehension issues. They appear to be related to thinking you're correct and being unwilling to examine the situation.
The USA has drafted soldiers, and could again. This means the system is set up in such a way as to contain people who do not want to be there.
As for voluntarily leaving the army, you are hysterically delusional. Sure, there are early ways out of basic service, some even with an honorable discharge, but they are all at the discretion of the army.
As for the military lying, surely you know what a recruiter is. Then surely you know that they'll promise nearly anything to get you to join. They have quotas. Here's just one article, google for more.
So you can be conscripted (just not right now, how comforting), will be lied to in order to be tricked into joining, and have no real practical way out.
As for being shot, I encourage you to look at the penalties for desertion in the face of the enemy. Death and life imprisonment are both options. The last time a soldier has been court-martialed and executed was 1945, but what do you think they do in the field? Gently arrest you and send you back home for a comfortable trial? More like, KIA.
For a country without the draft, can you explain selective service registration? Huh? Summer-camp paperwork?
If you could be conscripted, and merely are not yet, you're still a slave. Either you have freedom, or it can be taken away and you could be forced to go to war for a cause you don't believe in.
What do the stores you shop at do when opening or closing a register? The ones I've seen (when a clerk leaves people in their line) is that two lines start merging, alternating fashion. When another till opens, people break off in the same alternating fashion. Perhaps your version of a queue is somewhat limited.
Besides, a name is just an arbitrary name. The structure acts the way he described, so we should drop the names and just describe the behavior.
However, the reason people park on the highway (traffic jams) would go away if there was significant distance between cars reducing the amount of emergency braking/etc going on. The non-parked scenario has less cars per stretch of road but has them traveling consistently at the proper speed.
There are costs, but middlemen are people between you and the customer. Here it seems like Trent could walk down the street handing out CDs and collecting money, all of which he gets to keep.
I don't mind businesses existing to do middlemen things, but I do mind the exclusive way they act and how all services are bundled. If you want shelf space in any store, you take the full line of RIAA 'services' for 95% of the profit.
In the future, ideally, even if you end up paying 95% of your revenue in services, it'll be to people you choose for services you actually want. In that market a smart business owner could make a lot more money by handling the arrangement of these services and skimping on stuff they don't want.
For instance, album art. That may have mattered on records (large area) and for retail sales, but what's the point of some little picture associated with the MP3/Ogg? There's a savings for the e-market only musician.
And if you just wanted it in a variable you could write:
puts nums = (1..10).collect
Personally, I dislike the do/end block style and the multi-line nature. It's wordy and means I can't see as much on the screen. I'd rewrite the example as:
nums = [] 10.times {|n| nums << n } nums.each {|n| puts n }
Though the benefits IMHO come only when you start chaining commands together, as with a pipe (|) in shell.
# take numbers, multiply all by 2, discard any evenly divisible by 3, turn to strings, reverse, join around commas, and print (1..10).collect {|n| n * 2 }.reject {|n| n.remainder(3) == 0 }.collect {|n| n.to_s }.reverse.join(', ') => "20, 16, 14, 10, 8, 4, 2"
Admittedly, that's kind of a strange set of things to do, but very often it lets me stick to one line per intent, instead of letting the necessary actions dictate the shape of my code.
Cotton brushing was pretty obvious to him, so he made a machine to do it. The mechanism of the machine was patented, not the brushing.
In Akamai's case, there is so little mechanism that they're essentially patenting standard sysadmin tools. Round-robin DNS is an old concept, it usually distributes fairly, or on workload. The only difference in Akamai's case is that it's geographical, and that's just an easy lookup.
Perhaps because 'we', presumably uber-logical geeks, are smarter than everyone else. Maybe not by touchy-feely standards of IQ, but by the metric of being able to better parse complex statements, or design complex systems, yes.
As to smarter than other techs? Well, there are many people who assume that because they didn't know how to do something it must be black magic. There are others who know, from experience, that there is little you can't do well with a well-intentioned group of smart developers. (Polish to release, get in under budget, those are hard, but actually accomplishing the specific bit of tech, usually fairly easy.)
The problem is that 'obvious to whom' is the wrong question. We need to say, given similar funding and goals, would other teams be likely to discover this. In other words, if you advertised and did a talent search, would anyone be able to figure it out.
I guess that most thing which aren't obvious are that way merely because nobody asked those questions. At that point, we're giving business-model patents instead of tech patents, because the tech is often trivial (one-click) but Amazon's idea did speed up e-commerce. It's kind of like the Oscar's, they miss rewarding a good movie one year so they give the director his 'just rewards' a year later, for a crappier movie.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine was killed in Aug 2006 by an animal on the road.
She was driving along the highway and an elk jumped out in front of the vehicle ahead, bounced up over it, and into her windshield. Everyone who saw the accident said there was nothing she could have done, as she couldn't have even seen the elk until it was coming over the vehicle in the front. Her passenger, and the people in the car ahead, were all fine.
But, of course, what she could have done was not follow the vehicle ahead so closely.
Just saying...
You obviously haven't got the barest grasp on the term, you're simply too stupid to prove shit.
You haven't even shown that 'the military shoots deserters' is inaccurate, let alone that it is a deliberate misrepresentation.
Besides, my point is that you forfeit your rights. That the military can shoot you is enough. When you join the army your rights go away. You don't relinquish them, they are taken. If they were relinquished, you would take them back when lied to or treated unfairly. As this is clearly not an option, you clearly no longer have those rights.
You don't even understand the issue, it's no wonder you don't understand the ramifications.
As for what you predict, yes numbnuts, it's usual for people to reply to messages. You may also wish to predict my future typing, eating, walking, and of course, putting you in your ignorant place.
But who says you're abusing it? If the server is configured to give you a response, why should you think that it's not intended?
They obviously had to intend to install the servers, and encode the shows, configure the webserver, etc.
There's no reason for anyone who views this to assume that it isn't intentional. Many sites let you view their content without ads (printable pages, etc) because at least you're not with a competitor. And even if it didn't make business sense, why is that the customer's responsibility to assess?
All they had to do was call the system administrators and tell them to lock down that URL to anyone with an "I've viewed ads cookie", or whatever else they want.
Why aren't they expected to do this? Why is this the viewer's problem when they should just stop providing what they don't want to provide?
Imagine a company with separate a storefront. Management runs a free widget day every now and then when a supplier has overstock or wants publicity. Salespeople happily distribute these free products to drive sales of related products.
Now imagine that the managers mistype a stock number and instead of giving away mice, the store is giving away laptops. Anyone who got a free laptop (and thinks it's just an insane giveaway day) rightly calls their friends to let them know, etc.
What should the hypothetical managers do when they realize this? Send police to the store to arrest anyone attempting to receive a free laptop? Try to censor message boards about the supposed free laptop day? Or maybe call the store and tell them not to distribute free laptops?
If you grade people on homework then you lack some understanding. You may be great at other parts of teaching, but you're just encouraging cheating and punishing those who don't by lessening the apparent (grades) distance between the actually good and the successful cheats.
People take courses with graded homework because by cheating on it they can get a high enough grade on the homework to pass despite their low exam performance.
Tests are *the* time to separate those who know from those who cheat.
Just provide the homework as a self-graded exercise. Explain what the test will cover and let people make their own decisions.
Sure. And the webserver is your property. And your property sent me a copy of your webpage.
You really don't get the point of a public URL. It's like a phone number. There's no law against calling a phone number, even if the answering machine is playing copyright songs.
I think you're confused. DRM is what companies do to things they sell you. They're like a lock on part of the product that they don't even unlock when you buy it.
If they used DRM everyone could still view it, but wouldn't be able (theoretically) to make excerpts for quoting, etc.
Here nobody (of the viewers) owns the product so it would be reasonable for them to password it. But that's a lot different than DRM.
I don't think this has anything to do with DRM...
DRM is about restricting your rights and ability to use something you own. Had they 'protected' this it would just be passwording a URL because nobody has an inherent right to watch the show. (Merely a right to go to any URL and view anything it displays, which may be a show, or may be a 'click here to buy access' notice.
If you try to leave, they will shoot you if they can't apprehend you by other means, and will use lethal force to keep you in jail *if* they don't execute you. (Unlikely except during war, yes, but still a very real possibility - especially if you're unrepentant.) They *may* choose not to kill you, but it's their decision. They have exercised it a number of times. "You evidently have no concept of the time it takes to write a Slashdot post"
ANd you evidently are still having trouble with reading comprehension No moron, I haven't been "trolling" you, if that's what you call being right, for a week. It's only taken about fifteen minutes. If you can't see that meaning in 'the time it takes to write' you may be
In fact, I'm telling you to reply and try again. Yes massa, right away massa.
Remember when you were saying that the military doesn't take your rights away?
You said that they don't and had a asinine justification about people relinquishing their rights. If you want to see a filthy fucking liar, get a mirror. It's assholes like you who spread the deepest shit. It's far more correct to say the military shoots deserters than to say that the joining the military doesn't remove your rights. They have the legal right to shoot you, you don't have a legal right to leave.
UCMJ 85 (c) Any person found guilty of desertion or attempt to desert shall be punished, if the offense is committed in time of war, by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct...
In the face of the enemy, yes. Desertion can lead to you getting shot. Perhaps on the battlefield as you flee, or by a firing squad.
The government doesn't shoot many deserters now, but then they aren't drafting now and the two tend to go together. That doesn't change that they have the authority to.
If you try to desert and they toss you in jail, you still haven't left the armed forces but they will certainly shoot at you if you try to escape prison.
Death, or military prison. Great choices.
Trolling you? For days? You evidently have no concept of the time it takes to write a Slashdot post. Nor for what trolling is, but that's hardly the first comprehension problem you're having.
Just burning you up... But no, you don't care. Not at all. You posted to tell me so.
If you weren't such an abominable asshole this wouldn't be so funny.
You have no idea what a lie is. You evidently think it means a statement you can't refute.
However you want to phrase it, you lose the ability to manage your own life when you join the armed forces. Even if you agreed with what they told you at recruitment they wouldn't honor it.
If that's demonstrably a lie, why don't you do so? Perhaps because you couldn't? Hmmmm?
You care Sparky. A lot. It must burn you up inside to be so incapable of even simple arguments. You won't reply to this, because I'm saying this, but you'll go kick something.
I have seen the behavior you describe, but it's far from universal.
What happens when a clerk is called to another part of the store? They try to cover, but sometimes need to close a line immediately.
When they open a nearby register people in the front of the one line seem to have a general societal right-of-way as the woman expected, but only when they aren't sleeping as you describe.
You could try to prove me wrong, but that would only further demonstrate your complete lack of understanding.
You obviously don't understand half of the words you use, so it's unlikely you understand all of the ones I use. You may ask about the big ones. If you stop being a total fucktard I might even help without condescension.
Are you saying that recruiters always tell the truth?
Or that leaving the army is voluntary?
Or that you can't be killed/jailed for life for desertion?
Or that there is no provision for starting the draft even if it's inactive now?
Start everyone with a motorcycle license. After 1000 logged hours without incident, allow a compact car, etc.
Starting with a bicycle might be a good idea. And there are some pedestrians who need their licenses revoked... It's a complex issue.
Did I get this right?
Your Parents and the Truck and other Cars
1)
PT
2)
P
CT
3)
P
CC
CT
4)
PC
CC
CT
And that this is because your parents didn't want to cut over so quickly as to not give the truck proper stopping distance?
If so, they were in the right. Doing so wouldn't be safe. Anyone who says otherwise is a tailgater.
Try moving over just a bit to take up both lanes, not enough to be in the truck's way, but to make it obvious that you'll cut off anyone who tries to pass before they manage it. It'll also make your intent to get out of the way more obvious to the other drivers, hopefully giving them a reason to wait.
Did you do what I'm describing, as one of the following cars, to give them time? If so I think that was good too. If more people would do that (go out of their way to give them extra space) whenever anyone's having a problem we'd all be a lot happier.
You're too close to it. That's the definition.
The real reason NK is still where they are? They didn't assassinate their tyrant. Live and learn.
Would you rather a lunatic who'd merge into a 2-car space at highway speeds be in front of you where you can see him and he'll quickly vanish into the distance, or stuck impatiently behind you looking for any opening? If you give him a safe place to merge into he'll rocket off safely (to you) and endanger other people.
If you maintain a slower speed he'll hit the traffic jams (and fume) only to have you pull up behind him just as traffic starts to move. It's so funny when people get apoplectic about traffic as you serenely cruise along.
But if the coed chokes for ten seconds before drinking the remainder of the beer she's getting less alcohol per hour than with a slower feed.
Traffic jams leave ~1m between cars, almost at a standstill. That's a rate of one car per 5-10 seconds, at best. If they left 40m between cars and cruised at 100kph you'd get roughly three cars in the same time.
The faster and smoother emptying rate of the highway should actually empty the feeder roads faster than it would if everyone crammed on at once.
You have extreme comprehension issues. They appear to be related to thinking you're correct and being unwilling to examine the situation.
The USA has drafted soldiers, and could again. This means the system is set up in such a way as to contain people who do not want to be there.
As for voluntarily leaving the army, you are hysterically delusional. Sure, there are early ways out of basic service, some even with an honorable discharge, but they are all at the discretion of the army.
As for the military lying, surely you know what a recruiter is. Then surely you know that they'll promise nearly anything to get you to join. They have quotas. Here's just one article, google for more.
So you can be conscripted (just not right now, how comforting), will be lied to in order to be tricked into joining, and have no real practical way out.
As for being shot, I encourage you to look at the penalties for desertion in the face of the enemy. Death and life imprisonment are both options. The last time a soldier has been court-martialed and executed was 1945, but what do you think they do in the field? Gently arrest you and send you back home for a comfortable trial? More like, KIA.
For a country without the draft, can you explain selective service registration? Huh? Summer-camp paperwork?
If you could be conscripted, and merely are not yet, you're still a slave. Either you have freedom, or it can be taken away and you could be forced to go to war for a cause you don't believe in.
What do the stores you shop at do when opening or closing a register? The ones I've seen (when a clerk leaves people in their line) is that two lines start merging, alternating fashion. When another till opens, people break off in the same alternating fashion. Perhaps your version of a queue is somewhat limited.
Besides, a name is just an arbitrary name. The structure acts the way he described, so we should drop the names and just describe the behavior.
If this was for parking density, it would matter.
However, the reason people park on the highway (traffic jams) would go away if there was significant distance between cars reducing the amount of emergency braking/etc going on. The non-parked scenario has less cars per stretch of road but has them traveling consistently at the proper speed.
There are costs, but middlemen are people between you and the customer. Here it seems like Trent could walk down the street handing out CDs and collecting money, all of which he gets to keep.
I don't mind businesses existing to do middlemen things, but I do mind the exclusive way they act and how all services are bundled. If you want shelf space in any store, you take the full line of RIAA 'services' for 95% of the profit.
In the future, ideally, even if you end up paying 95% of your revenue in services, it'll be to people you choose for services you actually want. In that market a smart business owner could make a lot more money by handling the arrangement of these services and skimping on stuff they don't want.
For instance, album art. That may have mattered on records (large area) and for retail sales, but what's the point of some little picture associated with the MP3/Ogg? There's a savings for the e-market only musician.
It's more about the iterators than the printing.
To just print that you'd type
puts (1..10).collect
And if you just wanted it in a variable you could write:
puts nums = (1..10).collect
Personally, I dislike the do/end block style and the multi-line nature. It's wordy and means I can't see as much on the screen. I'd rewrite the example as:
nums = []
10.times {|n| nums << n }
nums.each {|n| puts n }
Though the benefits IMHO come only when you start chaining commands together, as with a pipe (|) in shell.
# take numbers, multiply all by 2, discard any evenly divisible by 3, turn to strings, reverse, join around commas, and print
(1..10).collect {|n| n * 2 }.reject {|n| n.remainder(3) == 0 }.collect {|n| n.to_s }.reverse.join(', ')
=> "20, 16, 14, 10, 8, 4, 2"
Admittedly, that's kind of a strange set of things to do, but very often it lets me stick to one line per intent, instead of letting the necessary actions dictate the shape of my code.
Cotton brushing was pretty obvious to him, so he made a machine to do it. The mechanism of the machine was patented, not the brushing.
In Akamai's case, there is so little mechanism that they're essentially patenting standard sysadmin tools. Round-robin DNS is an old concept, it usually distributes fairly, or on workload. The only difference in Akamai's case is that it's geographical, and that's just an easy lookup.
Perhaps because 'we', presumably uber-logical geeks, are smarter than everyone else. Maybe not by touchy-feely standards of IQ, but by the metric of being able to better parse complex statements, or design complex systems, yes.
As to smarter than other techs? Well, there are many people who assume that because they didn't know how to do something it must be black magic. There are others who know, from experience, that there is little you can't do well with a well-intentioned group of smart developers. (Polish to release, get in under budget, those are hard, but actually accomplishing the specific bit of tech, usually fairly easy.)
The problem is that 'obvious to whom' is the wrong question. We need to say, given similar funding and goals, would other teams be likely to discover this. In other words, if you advertised and did a talent search, would anyone be able to figure it out.
I guess that most thing which aren't obvious are that way merely because nobody asked those questions. At that point, we're giving business-model patents instead of tech patents, because the tech is often trivial (one-click) but Amazon's idea did speed up e-commerce. It's kind of like the Oscar's, they miss rewarding a good movie one year so they give the director his 'just rewards' a year later, for a crappier movie.